Your project may have billable tasks, but you don’t have rates entered for the tasks/people/project.

Your project may not be billable

If you’re seeing 0 for the billable amount on your project, the first step is to make sure that the project is billable. From the project’s settings, make sure that the Project Type is set to Time & Materials and that you’ve chosen to invoice by Project, Person, or Task Hourly Rate.

The No Hourly Rate option won’t result in a billable amount, since Harvest calculates billable amounts by multiplying rates x hours worked.

Note that if your project is a Fixed Fee project, the project analysis page will never display a billable amount in the summary information on the top half of the page. If the project has a fee-based budget, the Tasks and Team tabs on the bottom half of the page will have an If Billed Hourly column to show what the billable amount would be if it were a Time & Materials project.

Along the same lines, the summary time report won’t show a billable amount for Fixed Fee projects by default, but you can choose to display a “hypothetical” billable amount, as described in this article.

Your project may be set to billable but not have any billable tasks (or time was tracked to a non-billable task)

Once you’ve checked that your Time & Materials project has an hourly rate option selected, you’ll want to make sure that the project has tasks marked as billable. Time tracked to non-billable tasks won’t generate a billable amount.

Your project may have billable tasks, but you don’t have rates entered for the tasks/people/project

Check your project to make sure you have billable rates entered. If you’re invoicing by Project Hourly Rate, enter the rate in the Project Type section of the project’s settings; if you’re invoicing by Task or Person Hourly Rate, check the billable rates entered in the Tasks or Team section, respectively.

Note: When you add/change default rates for tasks (from Manage > Tasks), those rates will only be applied to new projects created going forward. If you have already existing projects, check each project’s settings page to make sure the rates are correct.

If you’ve checked all of these possibilities and are still seeing a billable amount of 0, contact us with the name of the client and project causing the trouble and we’ll be happy to take a look!